Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  Of course, he was very suspicious of Carrie Grethen. He kept saying, “We haven’t heard the last from that woman.” But at the time, he did not see how she could be making the calls and sending the mail because she was still locked up in New York—in Kirby.

  I will sum up six months of conversations with Benton by saying he had a very strong premonition that his death was imminent. He suffered subsequent depression, anxiety, paranoia and began to struggle with alcohol. He said he hid bouts of heavy drinking from you and that his problems were causing a deterioration in his relationship with you. As I listened to some of what you told me during our talks, Kay, I can see that his behavior at home did change. Now perhaps you understand some of the reasons why.

  I wanted to put Benton on a mild antidepressant but he would not let me. He worried constantly about what would happen to you and Lucy if something happened to him. He wept about it openly in my office. It was I who suggested he write the letter that Senator Lord delivered to you several weeks ago. I said to Benton, “Imagine you are dead and have one last chance to say something to Kay.” So he did. He said to you the words you read in his letter.

  During our sessions, I suggested to him repeatedly that perhaps he knew more about who was harassing him and perhaps denial was preventing him from facing the truth. He hesitated. I remember so well I had a feeling he possessed information he could not or would not say. Now I am beginning to think I might know. I have reached the conclusion that what began happening to Benton several years ago and what is now happening to you are connected to Marino’s Mafia son. Rocky is involved with very powerful criminal people and he hates his father. He would hate everyone who matters to his father. Can it be a coincidence that Benton got threatening letters and was murdered, and then this terrible killer, Chandonne, ends up in Richmond and now Marino’s terrible son is Chandonne’s lawyer? Is this tortuous road not winding, at last, to some dreadful conclusion that is meant to bring down everyone good in Marino’s life?

  In my office, Benton often referred to a Tlip file. In it he kept all the strange, menacing letters and other records of communications and incidents that he had begun to receive. For months, I thought he was saying Tip file, as in police tips. But one day I made mention of his Tip file and he corrected me and said the file was actually his T-L-P file which he pronounced tlip. I next asked what TLP stood for, and he said The Last Precinct. I asked him what he meant by that and his eyes filled with tears. His exact words to me were this: “The Last Precinct is where I will end up, Anna. It is where I’ll end up.”

  You cannot imagine my feeling when Lucy mentioned that this is also the name for the investigative consulting company that she has now gone to work for in New York. When I was so upset last night, it was not simply over the subpoena delivered to my house. What happened was the following: I got the subpoena. I called Lucy because I thought she should know what was happening to you. She said her “new boss” (Teun McGovern) was in town and mentioned The Last Precinct. I was shocked. I still am shocked and do not understand what all this means. Does Lucy perhaps know about Benton’s file?

  Again, can this be coincidence, Kay? Did she just happen to think up the same name that Benton called his secret file? Can all these connections be coincidences? Now there is something called The Last Precinct and it is located in New York and Lucy is moving to New York, the trial of Chandonne has moved to New York because he killed in New York two years ago while Carrie Grethen was still incarcerated in New York, and Carrie’s former murderous partner Temple Gault was killed (by you) in New York, and Marino began his police career in New York. And Rocky lives in New York.

  Let me close by telling you I feel so badly over any hand I might have in making your current situation worse, although you can be sure I intend to say nothing that can be twisted. Never. I am too old for this. Tomorrow, on Christmas Day, I will leave for my house in Hilton Head, where I will stay until it is all right to return to Richmond. I do this for several reasons. I do not intend to make it easy for Buford or anyone else to get to me. Most important, you need some place to stay. Do not go back to your house, Kay.

  Your devoted friend,

  Anna

  I read and reread. I feel sick as I imagine Anna growing up in the poisonous air of Mauthausen and knowing what went on there. I feel the deepest sorrow that all her life she has listened to references to Jews and bad jokes about Jews and learned more of the atrocities committed against Jews, all the while knowing she is a Jew. No matter how she rationalizes it, what her father did was cowardly and wrong. I suspect he also knew Anna was being raped by the SS commander he wined and dined, and Anna’s father did nothing about that, either. Not one thing.

  I realize it is now almost five o’clock in the morning. My eyelids are heavy, my nerves buzzing. There is no point in trying to sleep. I get up and go into the kitchen to make coffee. For a while I sit before the dark window looking out toward a river I can’t see and contemplate everything Anna has revealed to me. So much about Benton’s last years now makes sense. I think of days when he claimed to have a tension headache, and I thought he looked hung over and now I suspect he probably was. He was increasingly depressed and distant and frustrated. In a way, I understand his not telling me about the letters, the phone calls, the Tlip file, as he referred to it. But I don’t agree with him. He should have told me.

  I have no recollection of having come across such a file when I was going through his belongings after his death. But then, there is so much I don’t remember about that time. It was as if I were living under the earth, moving ever so heavily and slowly, and unable to see where I was going or where I had been. After Benton’s death, Anna helped me sort through his personal effects. She cleaned out his closets and went through his drawers while I was in and out of rooms like a crazed insect, helping one minute, ranting and weeping the next. I wonder if she came across that file. I know I must find it, if it still exists.

  The first morning light is a hint of deep blue as I fix coffee for Anna and carry it back to her bedroom. I listen outside her door to see if I hear any sign of her being awake. All is still. I quietly open her door and carry her coffee in. I set it down on the oval table by her bed. Anna likes night-lights. Her suite is lit up like a runway, lights inserted in almost every receptacle. When I first became aware of this, I thought it odd. Now I begin to understand. Perhaps she associates utter darkness with being alone and terrified in her bedroom, waiting for a drunken, stinking Nazi to come in and overpower her young body. No wonder she has spent her life dealing with damaged people. She understands damaged people. She is as much a student of her past tragedies as she has said I am of mine.

  “Anna?” I whisper. I see her stir. “Anna? It’s me. I’ve brought you coffee.”

  She sits up with a start, squinting, her white hair in her face and sticking up in places.

  Merry Christmas, I start to say. I tell her “happy holidays” instead.

  “All these years I celebrate Christmas while I am secretly Jewish.” She reaches for her coffee. “I am not known for a sweet disposition early in the morning,” she says.

  I squeeze her hand, and in the dark she seems suddenly so old and delicate. “I read your letter. I’m not sure what to say but I can’t destroy it, and we must talk about it,” I tell her.

  For an instant she pauses. I think I catch relief in her silence. Then she gets stubborn again and waves me off, as if by a mere gesture she can dismiss her entire history and what she has told me about my own life. Night-lights cast exaggerated, deep shadows of Biedemeier furniture and antique lamps and oil paintings in her large, gorgeous bedroom. Thick silk draperies are drawn. “I probably should not have written any of that to you,” she says firmly.

  “I wish you’d written it to me sooner, Anna.”

  She sips her coffee and pulls the covers up to her shoulders.

  “What happened to you as a child isn’t your fault,” I say to her. “The choices were made by your father, not you. He prote
cted you in one way and didn’t protect you at all. Maybe there was no choice.”

  She shakes her head. “You do not know. You cannot know.”

  I am not about to argue with that.

  “There are no monsters to compare with them. My family had no choice. My father drank a lot of schnapps. He was drunk most the time on schnapps and they would get drunk with him. To this day I cannot smell schnapps.” She clutches the coffee mug in both hands. “They all got drunk, it did not matter. When Reichsminister Speer and his entourage visited installations at Gusen and Ebensee, they came to our schloss, oh yes, our quaint little castle. My parents had this sumptuous banquet with musicians from Vienna and the finest champagne and food, and everyone was drunk. I remember I hid in my bedroom, so afraid of who would come next. I hid under the bed all night and several times there were footsteps in my room and once someone yanked the covers back and swore. I stayed on the floor under the bed all night dreaming of the music and of one young man who made such sweetness flow from his violin. He looked at me often and made me blush and as I hid under my bed later that night, I thought of him. No one who made such beauty could be unkind. All night I thought of him.”

  “The violinist from Vienna?” I asked. “The one you later . . . ?”

  “No, no.” Anna shakes her head in the shadows. “This was many years before Rudi. But I think it is when I fell in love with Rudi, in advance, having never met him. I saw the musicians in their black cutaways and was mesmerized by the magic they made, and I wanted them to steal me from the horror. I imagined myself soaring on their notes into a pure place. For a moment, I was returned to Austria before the quarry and the crematorium, when life was simple, the people decent and fun and had perfect gardens and such pride in their homes. On sunny spring days we would hang our goose-down duvets out windows to be scrubbed by the sweetest air I have ever breathed. And we would play in rolling fields of grass that seemed to lead right up to the sky while father would hunt in the woods for boar and mother would sew and bake.” She pauses, her face touched by sweet sadness. “That a string quartet could transform the most dreadful of nights. And then later, my magical thinking carries me into the arms of a man with a violin, an American. And I am here. I am here. I escaped. But I have never escaped, Kay.”

  DAWN BEGINS TO light up the drapes and turn them the color of honey. I tell Anna I am glad she is here. I thank her for talking to Benton and for finally letting me know. In some ways the picture is more complete because of what I now understand. In some ways, it isn’t. I can’t sharply outline the progression of moods and changes that preceded Benton’s murder, but I do know that about the time he was seeing Anna, Carrie Grethen was looking for a new partner to replace Temple Gault. Carrie had worked in computers earlier in her life. She was brilliant and incredibly manipulative and talked her way into gaining access to a computer at the forensic psychiatric hospital, Kirby. This was how she cast her web back out into the world. She linked up with a new partner—another psychopathic killer named Newton Joyce. She did this through the Internet, and he helped her escape from Kirby.

  “Perhaps she met certain other people through the Internet, too,” Anna suggests.

  “Marino’s son. Rocky?” I say.

  “I am thinking it.”

  “Anna, do you have any idea what happened to Benton’s file? The Tlip file, as he called it?”

  “I have never seen it.” She sits up straighter, deciding it is time to get out of bed, and the covers settle around her waist. Her bare arms look pitifully thin and wrinkled, as if someone has let the air out of them. Her bosom sags low and loose beneath dark silk. “When I helped you sort through his clothing and other personal belongings, I did not see a file. But I did not touch his office.”

  I remember so little.

  “No.” She pulls back the covers and lowers her feet to the floor. “I would not. That was not something I would go into. His professional files.” She is up now and slips on a robe. “I just assumed you would have gone through those.” She looks at me. “You have, yes? What about his office at Quantico? He had already retired, so I suppose he had cleaned that out already?”

  “That was cleaned out, yes.” We walk down the hallway toward the kitchen. “Case files would have stayed there. Unlike some of his compatriots who retire from the FBI, Benton didn’t believe cases he worked belonged to him,” I add ruefully. “So I know he didn’t take any case files away from Quantico when he retired. What I don’t know is if he would have left the Tlip file with the Bureau. If so, I’ll never see it.”

  “That was his file,” Anna points out. “Correspondence to him. When he spoke about it to me, he never referred to what was happening to him as Bureau business. He seemed to take the threats, the crank calls, as something personal, and I am not aware that he ever shared these things with other agents. He was so paranoid, mostly because some of the threats involved you. I was led to believe I am the only person he told. I know this. I said to him many times that I believed he should tell the FBI.” She shook her head. “He would not,” she says again.

  I empty the coffee filter into the trash and feel a spike of old resentment. Benton kept so much from me. “A shame,” I reply. “Maybe if he’d told some of the other agents, none of this would have happened.”

  “Would you like more coffee?”

  I am reminded that I did not go to bed last night. “I guess I’d better,” I reply.

  “Some Viennese coffee,” Anna decides, opening the refrigerator and picking through bags of coffee. “Since I am feeling nostalgic for Austria this morning.” She says this with a hint of sarcasm, as if she is silently berating herself for divulging details of her past. She pours beans into the grinder and the kitchen is filled briefly with noise.

  “Benton got disillusioned with the Bureau in the end,” I think out loud. “I’m not sure he trusted people around him anymore. Competitiveness. He was the unit chief and knew everybody was going to fight over his job the minute he even mentioned he was ready to retire. Knowing him, he handled his problems in total isolation—the same way he worked his cases. If nothing else, Benton was a master of discretion.” I am running through every possibility. Where would Benton have kept the file? Where might it be? He had his own room in my house where he stored his belongings and plugged in his laptop. He had file drawers. But I have been through those and never saw anything even similar to what Anna has described.

  Then I think of something else. When Benton was murdered in Philadelphia, he was checked into a hotel. Several bags of his personal effects were returned to me, including his briefcase, which I opened. I went through it just as the police had. I know I didn’t see anything like this Tlip file, but if it is true Benton was suspicious that Carrie Grethen might have had something to do with the crank calls and notes he was getting, might he not have carried the Tlip file with him when he was working new cases possibly connected to her? Wouldn’t he have brought the file to Philadelphia?

  I go to the phone and call Marino. “Merry Christmas,” I say. “It’s me.”

  “What?” he blurts out, half asleep. “Oh shit. What time is it?”

  “A few minutes past seven.”

  “Seven!” Groan. “Hell, Santa ain’t even come yet. What you calling me so early for?”

  “Marino, this is important. When the police went through Benton’s personal effects in the hotel room in Philadelphia, did you go through them?”

  A big yawn and he blows out loudly. “Damn, I gotta quit staying up so late. My lungs are killing me, got to quit smoking. Me and some of the guys and Wild Turkey hung out last night.” Another yawn. “Hold on. I’m coming to. Let me switch channels. One minute it’s Christmas, next you’re asking about Philadelphia?”

  “That’s right. The stuff you guys found in Benton’s hotel room.”

  “Yeah. Hell, yeah I went through it.”

  “Did you take anything? Anything, for example, that might have been in his briefcase? A file, for example, that might h
ave had letters in it?”

  “He had a couple files in there. Why do you want to know?”

  I am getting excited. My synapses are firing, clearing my head and pumping energy into my cells. “Where are these files now?” I ask him.

  “Yeah, I remember some letters. Weirdo shit that I thought I should pay some attention to. Then Lucy blew Carrie and Joyce out of the air and turned them into fish chum, and that exceptionally cleared the case, I guess you could say. Shit. I still can’t believe she had a fucking AR-fifteen in the damn helicopter and . . .”

  “Where are the files?” I ask him again and I can’t keep the urgency out of my voice. My heart is pounding. “I need to see a file that had the weird letters. Benton called it his Tlip file. T-L-P. As in The Last Precinct. Maybe where Lucy got the idea for the name.”

  “The Last Precinct. You mean where Lucy’s going to work—McGovern’s place in New York? What the hell’s that got to do with some file in Benton’s briefcase?”

  “Good question,” I tell him.

  “Okay. It’s somewhere. I gotta find it, and I’ll be over.”

  Anna has gone back to her bedroom, and I occupy myself with thinking about our holiday meal as I wait for Lucy and McGovern to get here. I start pulling food out of the refrigerator as I replay what Lucy told me about McGovern’s new company in New York. Lucy said the name The Last Precinct started out as a joke. Where you go when there is nowhere left. And in Anna’s letter, she said Benton told her The Last Precinct is where he would end up. Cryptic. Riddles. Benton believed his future was somehow connected to what he was putting in that file. The Last Precinct was death, I then consider. Where was Benton going to end up? He was going to end up dead. Is this what he meant? Where else might he have ended up?